The logical extension, which Twitter will roll out this quarter, is attaching places to tweets. Hmm, sounds somewhat familiar…

Thing is, this leads to an interesting gap. Instead of check-in fatigue, this could reduce the need to check in at venues; send a tweet, and it gets you automatically checked in at that venue, maybe even posting your tweet as a tip for that place.

One issue is the back-channel that occurs when you check in using a service like Foursquare. It’s good to get points and badges and shiny things; if check-ins are automatic, you don’t get any of that.

Still, it’s a nice concept for someone to implement, one day. Someone who isn’t me.

There have been arguments raging on and offline about paywalls, the commons, old media versus new media, and ‘information should be free’ for — well, it feels like forever now. One of the (many) components of new media under fire is the army of filthy idea-stealin’ bloggers, people who merrily subscribe to paid content and then go and paraphrase it on their free-to-view blogs (or in some cases, just copy it). Paul Carr makes an excellent point about the commoditisation of facts, the human need for information and thus the Internet hivemind’s tendency to trend towards free.

Information being free is good, for obvious reasons, unless you’re someone who wants to get paid to create it. There are plenty of arguments for well-crafted columns, investigative journalism, paid political pundits and so forth. But here’s a thought about the oft-maligned practice of reblogging, rephrasing, and retweeting.

Language is variable.

The more ways an idea or piece of information is expressed linguistically, the easier it is to find — it’ll match far more search queries, as a simple starting point. Although, in an echo of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, perhaps expressing an idea in multiple languages, or with different phrasings and words, could change the way people think about the idea. Even if this happens, the idea reaches far more people than it would have if it were confined to one site, in one language, by one author.

From Google’s point of view, if someone takes a New York Times article, paraphrases it, and links back to it, the data miners jump for joy. Beautiful, delicious data. We learn new things about the relationships between words and concepts — maybe one article said climate change but another global warming. The link-back gives us contextual data that can help too. (Linking to a climate change article with the text “This article on global warming”, for example).

Of course, paraphrasing and rewriting has been going on for years, a staple of the essay or lit review. But as with voice recognition, having the power to implement and use a feedback loop at world-scale is a mind-blowing thing. Google has the power to build an entire semantic web out of paraphrased blog posts, and that’s before we even look at contextual links in Wikipedia or Twitter link summaries. If that’s scary, just think of the magic that happens when you search for something and get a result that isn’t the exact terms you entered, but is the exact concept. With a bit of data, intelligence and an army of semantic web PhDs, it just could happen.

I loved watching this talk by Tom Scott from London’s recent Ignite 2 event. (The other talks are also online – cheers, Daniel).

On Tom’s website, he bemusedly answers the FAQ “Is this fictional?” — well, it’s utterly believable, and certainly threw today’s technology, from social media to flashmobs via 4chan, starkly into perspective for me. Excellent job, brilliantly delivered.

I’m trying to catch up on the notable talks of LeWeb — so far I haven’t seen anything revolutionary come out of it, but a few interesting things, so it’s hard to figure out what to watch (especially since my attention span for online video is absolutely terrible; I prefer transcripts 90% of the time). Still, this talk caught my eye as danah’s work is pretty awesome. It’s definitely worth a watch (and it has a transcript/crib, yay!).

There were two main themes as I understand it; firstly the concept that we all see the Internet differently, and secondly the question of whether we are looking or not. The former is something that’s fascinated me for a while. Being able to see someone else’s world through their eyes — through unedited honest life-stream social media updates, through their Facebook photos, etc — can verge on gratuitous voyeurism. It’s taking the idea of a reality celeb to a new level, in a way. Internet superstars don’t have to be A-list or royalty, they can just be the sort of people whose wry observations about daily life (be it a blog, YouTube channel or even Twitter stream) are entertaining and a form of escapism.

As well as e-stalking interesting people, the more useful (and far more voyeuristic) side of this is e-stalking people I vaguely know. Catching up on old friends’ or past acquaintances’ lives via their LinkedIn, Facebook photos, etc; it somehow seems all right to live vicariously through people if you’ve actually met them. Kinda.

The second theme is about the ugly stuff. There’s a lot of nasty things that happen in this world and increasingly, victims are talking about them online. Bullying isn’t more prevalent now than it used to be, but it is more visible, and the problem is that people assume that there’s an automatic equation between stuff being online and stuff being seen. As anyone who’s ever written a blog knows, you can often be writing for an audience of one, and even if you have a hundred Myspace friends, there’s no guarantee anyone’s listening. Or that their reports to the authorities of your accounts of mistreatment at home will ever get taken seriously.

It’s sort of a cross between Neighbourhood Watch and “eyes on the street“. We need to look out for the disturbing stuff, violence, crime, etc., and use that constructively to help people, to open up conversations rather than jump to conclusions. Because appearance is everything, and someone posting about drug use or self-harm on their Livejournal might be doing it to fit in, not as a cry for help. It’s so hard to find where the boundaries are between the projected image you want to create online, and the real self underneath. The move towards real-time stream-of-consciousness updating kind of helps, but even a simple tweet such as “Help me” needs to be taken in context.

This change, which apparently happened last Thursday along with the retweeting API and other fancy things, completely passed me by. So that’s why I’m talking about it nearly a week later. The big news? Twitter’s changed its default prompt, the question that every tweet is meant to answer, from “What are you doing?” to “What’s happening?”.

I think it’s interesting. Many tweets bear no resemblance to the ‘old’ question — conference and sporting blow-by-blow commentaries to interesting links, pieces of news and gossip, questions to the twitterverse, and random musings. Some did, of course; the almost canonical ‘eating cereal for breakfast’ and ‘in a queue behind the most annoying woman ever’ type of message, the daily commentary on one’s life that, interspersed with commentary on the wider world, is what makes Twitter so fascinating.

It’s not carefully considered and drafted news tweets or observations on the best MLM strategies that make Twitter fun, it’s the unedited stream of pure human honesty that flows from our hearts via our fingers with nary a look-in from our minds. It’s the things that annoy us, the fact that it’s wet outside, the frustration that Jedward didn’t get the boot (or the disappointment that they did). Certainly from the point of view of data-mining, heartless though it may seem, people being… well, people… is an intriguing fishbowl to glance into.

The fact that most people basically ignored the old ‘question’ means that changing it probably won’t fundamentally change Twitter. It more mirrors, rather than propels, a shift in the way Twitter is being used by citizen journalists and commentators the world over — and an attempt to get away from the dogged old ‘breakfast’ use-case that even I trot out time and again. Maybe it will make people stop and think a little when they’re about to post some banality or other, though, and that saddens me just a little.

Edit: It’s also interesting that Facebook’s question is “What’s on your mind?”, staying me-centric; this reflects the difference between the two services rather well, I think.

So, yesterday’s Monitoring Social Media conference is over, and all I have to show for it is a heightened case of RSI (ok, ok, I jest). My live notes from the talk are here – Alice, you were an inspiration, I just had to call up mental images of your GDC typing-at-the-speed-of-light – how could I not publish the notes I was already taking? All that training at videogame events has certainly paid off.

But now it’s time to reflect and put together some marginally more coherent thoughts on social media and the lessons of the day.

Lesson One. Social media is people.

We’re finally starting to get it. Social media isn’t about numbers, or spreadsheets, or models, or calculating ROI to the last tenth of a decimal point. It’s about people, and you can’t (always) chain people down in tidy little tickyboxes and assign numbers to them.

We are not numbers.

This causes conflict in organisations that are used to the ‘old’ ways of doing things and don’t really understand the ‘new’. The case for the new was presented again and again and again yesterday. Look. We get it. Social media  matters. People matter. It’s just difficult convincing higher-ups that it’ll impact the bottom line.

There were a few attempts to get some slightly more detailed answers on this subject. What exactly is the investment, when we talk ROI? Is it the cost of a tool? The cost of an agency? The cost of people? What will make the higher-ups listen? In the case of STA Travel, it was pointing out the properties of existing customers (that the STA relationship stopped once customers had booked a trip) and making a clear, coherent case for engagement to extend that relationship. But this brings me on to…

Lesson Two. Everyone is different.

We’re all human, and so naturally we want easy answers. But there are none. It seems that currently the range of social media monitoring tools (in terms of software offerings) is very much an off-the-shelf jobbie – obviously customisable to some extent within that, but still, off-the-shelf. Indeed, some companies with freemium/SaaS products seem to be encouraging this approach.

But if I learned nothing yesterday, it’s that everyone’s totally different, and that works for one client won’t work at all for another. Enter agencies, and humans (see point 3), and customisation, and tailoring. Hell, the agency behind Skype built a dashboard because nothing out there fit their needs! Weren’t all the SMM providers in the audience cringing at that? Speakers repeatedly said that today’s tools aren’t really that great – but some speakers praised them! What a load of mixed messages.

There is method to this madness, though, and it’s all about the human. People praising the tools probably used them well for their specific needs – people dissin’ them probably found that they were looking for something that the tools didn’t do. One thing seems sure though, the tools should work for the clients, rather than the 37signals-etc approach of ‘fit your thinking into the way the tool does it’.

Lesson 3. Automatic isn’t good enough.

This is obviously something I’m interested in, but it was almost disheartening to hear it repeated so much.

Basically, we need humans. We’ll always need humans. Tools help us cut down the humans’ time involvement, but there seems this fundamental mistrust – sentiment is wrong too much and too often, and even humans disagree 15% of the time (bang in line with the kappas I’ve seen in academia).

So even if there were a brilliant, perfect, 100% reliable sentiment detection system, it would be wrong 15% of the time, and so humans would want to check every message just in case. And if all you want is a ‘temperature’ type analysis, well, free tools already do that, and even allowing for error they’re just about good enough.

Lovely.

Lesson 4. We’re too close to the curve to see what’s around the corner.

The whole social media landscape is changing, and the monitoring stuff is just starting to catch up. Two years ago it was rubbish, nowadays it’s OK, and in two years it’ll be great. But the future’s not about technology, it’s about business intelligence, business process, and getting companies to embrace social media and its feedback loops at every level.

Because this is going to become such a fundamental part of how we do business, major players are already getting in the act. Search engines are integrating realtime search, so ’social’ SEO – building social capital – will become as important as keyword-based SEO. But you can’t just add in ’social keywords’ – that concept simply does not transfer.

As well as that, Google and Twitter could well be (hell, let’s just say it, they are already) developing their own social media monitoring systems. Google Analytics is powerful, but not in a social way – but it could be. Twitter could launch their own monitoring product and charge us for API use, creating an.. interesting, albeit unlikely, situation. Sure, cross-platform will still be a need, but we’ve already seen that that need varies so much even by department within a company!

One of the more interesting concepts to come up yesterday was that of an open source framework for monitoring social media, a plug and play approach that everyone could be using in two years – with a company making money where the hard stuff is, consulting and the human factor. I do wonder if this is perhaps viable, especially adding in outsourced human validation (MTurk) and cross-classification to reduce error.

Anyway, this is certainly all food for thought, and <shameless plug>should give me plenty to talk about at the RealTime ChristmasCrunch, at least!</plug>

- looking back we can predict the future – appropriate to supermarket etc, lots of customers, lots of regular interaction – but what if you’re not? what if you see your customers infrequently?
- understand consumers when they’re not in the store
- infrequent/irregular transactions > hard to draw conclusions, insufficient data.
- but looking at behaviour data -> what customers are really doing. actions > words. brand perception doesn’t always line up with market share (chewing gum).
- questionnaires channel consumer into a specific frame of mind. [tweet; this isn't how market researchers do it any more]
- but what if we don’t have the consumer in the room? -> smm
- [... more stuff that isn't new, people use social media, it's growing, etc]
- dell example
- orange. saw no association between a ‘problems’ website and internal customer service. analysed it all. magic.
- comcast [cares].
- challenges; high level of human input even in automated tools – labour intensive. AI engines – orange the company vs orange the fruit. How much credence to give to findings. Context – blog with 1 important reader…
- no data set can help you fully understand your customer when considered in isolation. link them together – context + foresight = true insight. benefits of 360 view are seen by a lot of companies.
- social media = data collection tool as well as comm channel. note danger = hyperbole around SM may prevent customers using it in a meaningful way.
- B&Q – pulls together 20k data sets from organisation to inform how company is growing. SMM is one of the data sets. context matters.

- Q- single most important thing brand should be doing – think about how social media sits among other data within the organisation > how it’s going to add to the picture. “is it on a par with other data?” used correctly, can be more powerful.
- Q- ROI of analysis tools – Within overall context they’re reasonably priced. ROI is function of whether organisation set up to correctly use the tool.

Next up – Movember participant Giles Palmer on data. CEO Brandwatch.

[story about company past - had an idea, built something, etc]

what do SMM tools do
- gather search analyse present collaborate integrate.

gather
- how do you get all the information?
- having access to the data is an extremely difficult data challenge. they don’t buy in data. buying in is pretty smart, isn’t cheap to do it inhouse. use data aggregators. even if you buy it you have to store it – challenges of distributed data. it’s a massive exercise.

search
- it’s not the same as normal search. things like proximity search etc. google and friends rank by relevance – don’t have to worry about the long tail, less relevant hits buried deeper in. but in SMM you do care about long tail. there is no unimportant data. build up search strings – boolean operators – example of amazingly complex Shell string (mostly -”nut shell”, -”shell-shock” etc).

analyse
- structured [no. comments, no. links, author name..] and unstructured data
- challenge – doing it every day – every page has a different structure..
- unstructured data is even harder – text means different things to different people. sentiment and topic/theme analysis. over-claiming/jargon that goes on in this area.

sentiment
- sample 400k web pages, 1k topics, analysed by humans: 58% neutral, 28% pos, 14% neg.
- top brands in october – google, MS, sony, ebay, BBC (sentiment*volume); brighton, hershey, x factor, talent shows, fedex (sentiment avg)
- people don’t agree with each other all the time. in their tests – over 1k items, people agree 85% of the time. [this is inline with academic results]
- how do you measure sentiment of millions of web pages (40-50m every day)
- crowdsource? expensive. slow. inconsistent. calculations at 30 articles an hour, £2000 for 10k articles.
- machines? kind of. not as good. machine learning. [not NLP? seems to refer only to bayesian type classification]
- hardest bit isn’t machines doing SA – it’s deciding which words/sentences you send to the machine [feature set]. individual article vs forum posts- which words refer to the subject you’re trying to sentiment-analyse? bigger impact on sentiment analysis than the classification algorithm.

stats and recommendations
- 650k mentions in 60 industries – the language per industry varies wildly
- 94% swedish videogames ["fluke"], 50% portuguese telecom
- target 75% but “bloody difficult” – if you classified everything as neutral you’d get ~60%!
- for small volumes crowdsource, large volumes use machines but look at most important mentions _manually_

Other analysis
- topic analysis, network maps and influence
- topic clouds, network visualisation (they don’t do it), influencers (“bloody difficult”)

Collaborate & Integrate
- passing data within and without organisation – agencies doing it right now. collaboration around data becoming more important, as is integration throughout the campaigns etc [see earlier presentations]

free giveaway! www.brandwatch.net/4 – 50 free beta testing accounts for a month.

[side note - people confusing semantic (understanding) with sentiment (tone) analysis]

Q&A – real challenge re sentiment is not algorithms but which words actually talk about you. [relevance.]
- Q- access to data – will we get more or less? Probably less (murdoch) > cost of tools increases.
- Q- solutions for very large amounts of data? distribute and “buy shitloads of servers”. can ditch useless data. stick it on the cloud? done the maths, and it’s not cheaper. it will be, but not yet.

Now – Brad Little from Nielsen BuzzMetrics on free vs paid.

- setting the scene – social media – millions of google results. 364 people on twitter call themselves “social media guru”.
- there are a *lot* of people monitoring buzz.
- why so many approaches?
- different objectives = different tools. no one type of social media.
- different investment levels drive various approaches.
- ability to listen in this way that’s new – not WOM itself. Do you *really* want to get to know your customers? It’s often about stock price, not action.
- DIY/Free tools – they’re free!
- Software – probably higher quality, more data, do more things
- Analyst – people + data – quality and expertise
- Consultant – Relationships – great access to clients. Actionability – what do we do with data.
- many free tools. forrester wave listening platforms Q1 2009 – looked at offerings.
- weakness:
- DIY – partial view
- Free – limited scope
- Software – reduced accuracy
- Analyst – speed, cost
- Consultant – using tools from 1-3

steps involved
- data collection > analysis > implementation [didn't want to repeat earlier talk]
- example – needed to harvest EA forum for a game project
- do we measure a tweet the same way as a blog or forum post
- how do we clean the data – GIGO
- people vs technology. local, multilingual, centralised teams? keywords or logic? “gossip AND girl”. massive query needed to isolate. markets of languages – just because you collect data doesn’t mean you can properly analyse it.
- implementation – recommendations & strategy.

Dyson example – air multiplier.
- what is actually being measured [examples of coverage]
- tech support issue, whether dyson is standing behind its products – analyst can see themes far easier than computer.
- mixed sentiment words in negative review [love, clever].

featurebabble – would take more than one fulltimer to compare these.
tools locked in ‘feature war’ – distracts marketplace from advancing.
tools will largely commoditise. differentiation in data quality / breadth, services provided, and expertise implementing actions.

-what are most of these tools trying to do?
- cover lots of data
- relevant and clean informatino – to save time
- manage process of workflow – save time, max effectiveness
- customise end output & result – user control
- liberate content – uncover what you need without restrictions
- support – value++, realise other benefits.

who is more influential?
- influence isn’t just quantitative metrics (x number of followers etc) – it’s also about what they’re saying. advocacy as metric, not influence.

FAQ
“can’t we get this stuff for free” – not really as good, less data, different output
“your data’s rubbish because google has way more results” – spam, redundancy, etc. apples vs oranges.
“compare providers by running a search and seeing who has most buzz” – that’d just incentivise companies to include spam! different coverage etc.
“a trial’s a good way to compare services, right?” – no it’s rubbish. tool provider – trials a matter of numbers – sophisticated queries etc require human time investment, customisation, effort. not just easiest to use right off the bat, got to set it up to get max performance [argument against freemium model here]

social media process: listen, learn, execute. [same stuff as earlier]

when unlocking value of tools please remember
- all data is not created equal
- dashboards have strengths but don’t answer every need
- combine research methodologies – listening *and* asking
- active client participation is key ***
- actionable insights = when tools (tech) combine with good local market researchers (people).

“buzz is up 5X” is a fact not an insight.

final recommendations
- determine stakeholders
- what you want to get out of it and what you might want to do with it
- look under the bonnet, don’t just talk to salespeople
- understand difference between monitoring, researching and strategy
- listen learn and then engage
- event, issue, launch or specific (anything) => more interesting research than general buzz.

WOM and SM are people based endeavours, and so is the research.

@bradleyjlittle

- Q- Someone’s influence (quantitative) *is* an indicator of content quality. -> Understanding how they talk about something is important – need a “BS meter” to distinguish quality/authority.

Panel – Jos Smith chairing “What’s wrong with SMM?”

Nick Koudas – Sysomos. Emmanuel Vivier, Asi Sharabi, Mark Rogers.

Nick:
- Spam. 65% of information in blogosphere is spam – noise > signal.
- sentiment analysis – more time = better. trade off.
both of the above are key technology challenges.
- pricing.
good; adaptive, global, granular focus, exhaustive coverage, interactive.

Emmanuel:
- cost to evaluate platforms – make it easy to try out and preach solution to clients. should Just Work. are you a software solution or a consultancy.
- if you don’t put people on top of good solutions you’ll not have the best answers even if you use the best tools.

Asi:
- umbrella with holes in
- unsustainable fishing
- tools – small print – need plenty of analyst time.

Mark:
- Unknown unknowns – how do you find the stuff you don’t know – most of it serendipity at the moment.

How can the industry make it easier for clients wanting to use SMM?
- mark – show how it really relates to money in the door. the winner will be able to show a lovely graph correlating SM with sales.
- within every big org there needs to be someone with a sophisticated understanding of what it all means – but it’s a lot of work. need some good people both sides.
- nick – ease of use of tools. if you say ‘lets do social media’ need clear business metrics. sometimes that’s not analytics but insights.
- emmanuel – not just a black box – need to know how it works and how to customise it.
- ann longley from audience – research – having done it manually using free tools and now using paid tools – in spite of limitations, tools have a great advantage. trick is being cost-effective, having clear brief.

spam
- what is it? malicious advertising, self promotion. big problem. twitter, most content produced by 5% individuals. most of that information is bots. ongoing battle. the moment there’s a defence, there’s a new technique.
- “if it can’t be spammed, it’s not social media”. everyone’s going to want to fake conversations. most spam right now about playing google, but that’s changing (coming to get us). pattern matching – keywords – vs links by real people / links by spammers and infer.

resources
- fulltime post – ’social media monitoring dude’ inhouse. agency side takes a while to strike balance – internal vs client resources.
- a lot of over claiming, ubiquity of google problematic.

final comments
- listening is only part of the problem. don’t spend all your money on the tools.

After a tea break it’s We Are Social’s Robin Grant on how they helped Skype.

‘facilitating conversations for its clients will become the new role of an agency’ forrester

broke SM strategy down into three areas.
- corp blog had turned into one-way press release delivery system.
- took blogs from one-way to a genuine conversation platform, made sure everything on topic.
- made sure they were responding to comments, surfacing and documenting stories. put product managers in front of the public.
- trust – people trust other people, not adverts. impacts purchasing behaviour.
- online conversations do drive sales – Gruhl & Guha paper. 2 day lag between conversation and sales.
- we can start conversations – sent a phone to Loic – but that’s a small drop in the ocean. background chatter – respond to it. [but sometimes corp comments on blogs can go down the wrong way]
- create moment of positive WoM – skype reply to random help request ‘does anyone know how to…’ ‘great Twitter moment, Skype blogger sends me an answer’. rep++.

how did they do it?
- none of the monitoring tools are perfect (“none are that great”) – looked at them – wanted every single conversation so used publicly available tools and built system on top of that. “need a human being reading every one of those conversations” > triage process. yahoo pipes, etc.
- identified key communities and individuals
- set up keyword alerts (lucky, specific keyword)
- triage – make sense of conversation. filter for items that can be meaningfully responded to. initially low bar – but as confidence increased, so did participation – there is no bar. as soon as you remove ‘faceless’ aspect of corporation people less likely to rant and rail.
- assign most appropriate response – online ticketing system.
- Review monthly – dashboard for insights. overview. alerts, twitter, getsatisfaction, categories over time, trends over time.
- categories, priorities designed to fit with skype’s needs

effective even in times of crisis
- crisis when this system set up – china spying news story
- spread like wildfire
- usual approach – terse press release
- got CEO to write a blog post
- went back out to conversations on social media and left a response
- that then got referred to in future posts
- sponsored adwords ’skype+china’ – relatively unnecessary – skype’s own blog got #1 search result within 24hrs.

Q&A
- Q- who’s “we”/who’s doing what? – It’s a transitionary process, initially outsourced to we are social, but over last 18 months that’s mostly gone inhouse. now doing it all internally – takes 30-45 minutes in morning and evening.
- Q- not realtime then? – on a normal day.. no. product launches, announcements -much closer eye. [but they can't spot crises within minutes?]
- Q- what’s PeterAtSkype’s fit within the company? – ex we are social employee now inhouse at skype. someone who really understands & is passionate about social media.

Marshall Sponder – Impromptu panel
Future of SMM
webmetricsguru.com

- social media platforms today are immature – focusing on quantitative metrics not actionable data.
- forrester wave – only the largest platforms were listed – >$10m revenue and x enterprise clients. many of the interesting technologies excluded.
- nobody’s defined:
- what conversations are > how conversations are measured.
- what’s really positive, negative and neutral [er - we don't?]
- how listening platforms integrate with data from other systems – call centres, POD, analytics… data still silod.
- meaningful consulting services to help businesses engage with data.

sentiment analysis today is too much like quantum physics
crimson hexagon vs techrigy, sm2 etc. get something different out. what is the reality? the truth?

today 99% of the time, social media takes a long time before results
- so what should we monitor to show success
- no clear indication what to measure, what to expect after 3/6/9/12 months..
- no clear idea how much to spend
- no standards on what SM is and how it should be measured

at least in web analytics – might not agree how we measure a visit – but we have consistent metrics- bounce rate, etc.

most platforms today not capable of advanced semantic analysis/meme clustering. [not really semantic analysis but more meme/attitude categorisation]

awful geolocation capabilities – out of 312 blog entries located in NY, only 30 were from bloggers in NY [Alterian] – more luck with blogger directory, not tool.

- overlap free vs paid tools. SMM solutions wiki.
- No standards for social media and little desire for them from vendors.

so what does the future hold?
- meme tracking common capability of select paid & free tools. along with ability to act on data. crimson hexagon leading now. would be good to pull out twitter handles – drill down.
- integration of social media with web analytics, crm, search. google could accelerate this, merging SMM into google analytics.
- new SM teams formed, merges etc
- social search fuel development of new SMM capabilities. sidewiki comments, google caffeine > real-time search results, google waves [lots of google....]
- businesses will adopt SM via real time search results – they’ll have no choice. (smm as new SEO)
- as a field? look at web analytics recent history. merging SMM with business intelligence
- maturation of common set of definitions. thisisbeta.influencescorecard.com. seeing a need for standards.
- open source modular tools > assemble and customise our own monitoring platforms. current lock in even though everyone’s using the same data.
- facebook data
- real time alerts in facebook
- social media budgets more closely aligned with paid/organic search budgets (due to move of RT search into google, bing)
- monitoring analytics for SM – part of marketing budgets in many corps.
- first true keyword tools to be released – conversations not keywords – tools will be released that allow optimisation of social media similar to SEO [this seems a bit left field.. social media doesn't work on keywords, it's people driven]
- event horizon – are we too close to SMM to predict?

slides here

Panel – The future of social media monitoring
Neville Hobson, Marshall Sponder, Matthaus Krzykowski, Philip Sheldrake and Andrew Grill

- how do brands who’ve been programmed how to market act in the ‘real life’ of social?
- social media will be part of lifeblood of company. recruiting, growing company, strategic planning tool.
- social media subset of ’social web’ – the network itself is interesting, once we break away from proprietary – internet of things
- new brand of SMM tools – two startups with 95% success rates on specific industries. lot of innovation in silicon valley. twitter will get into the game. social gaming is big. hollywood model is doomed- tweet on a friday and nobody will go on saturday.
- more emphasis on business intelligence – it’s being absorbed. social media is currently separate/added in – it’s going to become integrated. semantic web going to solve a lot of problems. microformats stuff has to happen. standards body. [ed- how do you standardise the concept of relevance.....]
- lot of work is cleaning data – if you can eliminate the part that isn’t about your clients.
- accuracy/verticals – 95%
- automated sentiment isn’t there yet => manual classification with expert analyst familiar with media – you can’t train bloggers – can’t do everything automatically. dealing with mixed-sentiment posts.
- will brand mass monitoring become automated hell?
- self-regulating – social media start to regulate it – habitat example. it can happen but will be squashed.
- current tools – problems. even vendors criticised have been very generous. the infrastructure to bring them together hasn’t happened. problem is usually with procurement – organisations don’t know how to procure – so end up with not-quite-right solution that compounds – no wonder things don’t work. need people to bridge that.
- products will get better – that’s how technology works
- problems are overrated. services are good enough. get 3 hours job down to 10 minutes is the crux.
- “that happened a year ago in the US” – cycle times getting quicker. industry needs to listen. if it makes sense we’ll do it.
- similar problem with data analytics – understanding question + matching capabilities of tool to it.
platforms aren’t mature.
- “we didn’t have half of this stuff 2 years ago” – we’re not there yet either. some of the free stuff is really good.
- impact of google wave. – “what is it”
- if we shut down facebook and twitter then all our businesses cease to exist / what if twitter launch their own SMM service and charge us for data. lot of insecurity in market. risks.
- open v proprietary – origin of web free – now everything’s proprietary – walled gardens. one-many pull system will take its place. EU privacy rights.
- language and culture. important – that’s why we use humans.
final comments
- listen, learn, engage, integrate
- fight for your individual rights
- get a job in social media monitoring

Up first Ann Longle,y Digital Strategy Director of mediaedge:cia

The case within an agency
- why we listen, how we listen and what we need from providers
- mediaedge, part of WPP, +25% year on year. death of advertising? they’re doing extremely well. more and more of ad spend going online.
- investment arm, WPP digital, looks at digital innovation and invests in best in class companies – visible technologies being one.
- earned media is now the most influential – recommendations from friends/experts >> advertising. massive impact on their core business.

- do need to be change agents, the social media dynamic is different.
- the base case for listening:
- kryptonite example -> if there are problems these days everyone knows about it. things are less likely to be kept quiet. no such thing as local news.
- others can undermine your messages – counter-campaigns [eg greenpeace]. organising protests has never been easier – if you’re not listening you won’t have a clue protests/boycotts are going on.
- social media is word of mouth on amphetamines. speed! kryptonite – 10 days to lose $10million. bad news can damage you quickly.
- news isn’t all bad. many brands have fans, people creating content that’s positive [jaffa cakes on screen]. this can be harnessed. if you’re not looking for your fanbase you’re missing opportunities. smart brands cultivate it. skins as example – get the fans actively involved.
- if you have fans, get them involved – it’s not just risk it’s opportunity.
- listening = raise digital literacy – it’s a journey of changing the organisation.

traditional marketing funnel -> now a lot more complex. not just eyeballs to buyers. calls out orange – using SM to promote announcements.
- marketing now a two-way street – a loop.
- reputation in the digital age – based on responsiveness/strength of fanbase/market leadership/product&service innovation.
examples – coke; 3.5m friends on FB, fans run the group. McDonald’s lets customers report on its operations. walkers let its customers create a new flavour and vote on them. starbucks, dell – invite regular co-creation.

going to hear clients talking about how much they’re talked about. superbrands based on online buzz; bbc, google, sony, apple, microsoft. online RT monitoring=instant feedback. http://www.superbrands.uk.com/. sentiment score on superbrands x credibility: top lego monopoly harrods virgin atlantix dulux guinness. a new order.

new world => new approach
- it’s about listening. what are people saying, topics, themes. separate relevant from irrelevant. who influencers are.
- planning – insights => not just online strategy but all activity.
- responding – [some brands don't respond, not ready yet - get them ready]
- evaluation => leads back into listening.

design and evaluation frameworks
- how do we get people involved. [table hopefully to come from slides]

benefits of paying attention – risk management, focusing on your and competing products – can get a lot of competitor intelligence > improve products and services. evaluate campaigns. look at other metrics too. find new influencers – always new people to talk to and partner with – eg plebble.
- tools chart – free vs fee based – fee based still ‘far from perfect’ but >> free.
- vendor screening checklist & how they listen. they make sense of data, but machines not humans = weakness. need human analysts.

what do we need from buzz monitoring providers?
- transparency about strengths and limitations. clarity – what you provide and don’t, what you will do later. coverage – don’t just blind us with big numbers, what is and isn’t included. services – training, workflows, data integration, vetting/classification. responsiveness – develop tool and service offer based on our requirements. work with us – we understand the clients.

annlongley.com

Q- free vs paid – free tools good for a temperature check, google a fantastic tool for basic research – but they don’t put the information in context. professional tools – good at aggregating, temporal information, exportable for your own voodoo. “do you have a favourite” – brandwatch named, wavemetrics.
Q- live events + social media – not off top of head.
Q- social media + CRM data? we’re on the beginning of that journey. social CRM = big next step. starting to have those conversations.

Tim Callington from Edelman on influence [slides]

[by now we are hearing the same things from everyone - top level views on why to listen and 'the problem' - twitter starting to comment that we all know this stuff already]

“identity online is dispersed”
we have the means to collect data but distilling it into useful is hard [we know this...] – tom waits quote “buried beneath the weight of information”
information != knowledge.
what do you want to achieve as a brand?
context > understanding > insight > strategy.
- understand community – why are people saying what they’re saying?
- quantity + quality = measure: attention; engagement; authority; influence; sentiment; content. page impressions; wall posts; links; followers; +/-; content quality.

[rest lost due to bsod - but mostly repeat of earlier talks]

katy howell – immediate future – behind-the-scenes reputation management
what really happens inside large organisations

the frameworks put in place don’t always match the clients/brands – silos, politics, competitiveness, age gaps, etc. trying to bring SM into a larger organisation = by steps. sneak in the best practices before anyone notices.

some of the probs big brands face: analysis, the enemy within, control/fear.

analysis – not just something you do at the beginning.. forensics + puzzle solving. how can you do it throughout your programme?
- client example. every time news out, twitter profile raised. news drove search demand.
- can’t be specific about exact best practices because every client is different.
- where’s the ROI?
- how do you get this done? move on the fly. clients assume it magically happens by itself. look beyond monitoring. do something with the learning!
- many large orgs have ‘unsinkable’ ethos. ‘we have everything we need’. that surety > safety – but they’re not safe.
- example of agency subcontracting – but naive post – immediately called out. despite corporate comms policy, leaks will happen. people working outside your organisation can cause you issues, having policies in place isn’t enough.
- example – activist attack a FB page. “don’t turn the site off, take it offline, monitor conversation” = advice. what happened? senior mgmt ignored advice and brought in lawyers.
- don’t sit in our own silos, we’re evangelists. it’s our remit to go explain and remove the fear. get mgmt to understand. educate. it’s a lot of work, hugely time consuming. scenario planning with senior mgmt – a lot happens on the fly!
- you don’t have to kill someone to take over their identity. brandjacking. it can be comedic not purely negative. orgs say “we’re on facebook and twitter!!” and forget about anything else. eg greggs bakers – negative discussion on twitter.

- follow trending technologies, reclaim accounts as soon as possible, make sure things are clearly official
- punching through social media – start thinking how you need to analyse the situation. use all your [spider] senses. make sure your activity online works for you – to its potential. spin a web. protect holes. don’t let reputation get the chance to escape. don’t ignore the green goblin – the internal enemy. get them on board and help them understand – crisis point is too late.

Q&A

Q- embargoes – taken one client 12 months to realise no amount of NDAs/embargoes will help. if you don’t want it known, don’t tell anyone! an example of frameworks great on paper but bad in practice – old media practices.
Q- examples of good issues management – preventing issues at the beginning is hugely important. gets irritated by monitoring. “we’ll get some tools in” – but that’s only *part* of it. watch and listen twice a day – it costs but incredibly effective.
Q- positive unprompted campaign #welovetheNHS – how can we bring that back to us? ask them what they want to share about, get them more involved – ask your fans what they need. look for different types of love – different people want different things. look and know your community.

Next up – STA Travel.

STA Travel Case Study
Celia Pronto

internal buy-in
- historically product led business
- started with social media audit – senior mgmt got involved when they saw people loved brand, products, experience – but the relationship ends when they’ve booked travel.
brand SM objectives
- Help – leverage expertise. encourage positive online wom
- Inspire – support overall marketing activity
- Leverage – existing investment in online tools and SM
- have ended up delisting products after social media feedback.
- help people connect – people asking questions and people providing answers – as well as create own content. set up WOM world – glue holding strategy together.
- STAtravelbuzz – separate site – showcase content, travel bugs programme – help people who actively come to STA. explorers-showcase people creating content – now past the point of booking. offline component too, stimulates online, driving 50% of word of mouth.
results
- positive vs negative sentiment – volume as well as what’s stimulating it.
- competitive benchmarking – intent to purchase and recommend vs competitor.
- broke down pos/neg/neut comments into three areas – helpful, quality, availability, value, reputable [how did they do this? manually?]
- graded polarity – how are people mostly feeling. [seem very sentiment focused]
tips for success
- know in advance what you mean to measure
- ensure consistent reporting and tracking – took 6-9 months to see results – consistent benchmarks help.
- integrate into business metrics and reports
- refine initial measurement criteria as you iterate.

Q&A

Q- what was the singular point to get buy-in? – debunking myth that everyone was talking about the company and saying nice things, esp. cf. competitors. pointing out finite relationship.
Q- explorers – even if they do post negative things STA are right there ready to engage and interact.
Q- resources – mixture of internal and external. agency manages explorers. integrated their own consultants into that. everything else inhouse. link to customer service team – complaints/issues – immediate response.
Q- success metrics – basic model at the moment. now – value/cost per post – positive/negative. favourability. adding in influence. when started out “we need to drive more of the business” – loose metrics like website stats.
Q- ROI models – can measure what people are doing online but hard to measure have they actually walked into a shop.

Panel – ROI of social media

@davidcushman chair – also chris quigley, matt atkinson, tommi leitonen, jon moody [no women! - search twitter for msm09+women for discussion]

- we struggle to measure interaction.
- jon – look at each reference out there. as well as positive/negative, is it a recommendation? suggestions? is there a call to action? how many questions? benchmark against competitors. the questions can lead you to figuring out what action to take (communicate better).
- what do clients say the ROI should be? how far should you push them?
- chris – a lot of clients aren’t really sure. built SM tool, spoke to 20 agencies/brands – “it can do all these things” – “great, but what do i *do* with it?” they could see the value of social media but hard to turn that value into ROI.
- value of wiki fixing – getting everyone to join in – listening => adapting.
- is there anything in data analytics toolkit that helps people rapidly solve probs + demonstratable to finance guys?
- tommi – ROI becomes more visible when you start looking at all the data.. not just marketing dept stuff.
- matt – we’re trying to get large orgs to integrate social media – start with how you use SM and insights to harness/improve existing activities. listening can really make a difference. enhance customer service. yes there are pioneering businesses like STA, but most of us trying to get an organisation to change over time, insights best used initially are to improve existing process.
- Q- what proportion of orgs that you work with use social media internally?
- more global clients more engaged in use internally.
- depends on scale of organisation. just the really big ones that worry about it.
- examples – IBM IdeaJam
- Q- what about the “I” in ROI. the costs of engaging in the overall process. social media investment can mean reconfiguring your business – that’s a major investment!
- at a base level a large number of clients can use social media as an enhancement – not too major an investment – focus on final goal and work backwards – small steps first.
- cost can be just employ someone to play with free tools or get an agency, can be quite low. do you have to go through fundamental change? probably but not right away. prove model first.
- Q- a lot of really good tools are pay-for. how long til google do it?
- they have something in the pipeline.
- Q- long point about analytics – data – not enough by itself – need to make decisions.
- initial work with customer insight dept. bring smart data. customer planning, insight planning and good analytics. most effort on “what does this tell you?” – human.
- “we take photos of what’s going on, we don’t video it” – snapshots rather than flow. behind curve with analytics.
- “you’ve got this data.. but then what” – they don’t want to know more – they know a lot already – it’s what to do with it that’s hard.
- Q- how would you convince me to use SM?
- i’d give you a story/example. where can social media add value for *you*, relate that to your existing spending -> ROI.
- sometimes you make the case by “x people saying this, y people seeing that message” – case to engage and monitor.
- Q- does ROI have to be financial? this is ’social’ media
- using social media to be more friendly/connected is sort of measurable, return into buying products, but the need for $$$ is not necessarily the main driver initially.
- benefits over time. eg BT, started out listening and some response, but are they making sense of the overall data yet?

ok that’s the end of the pre-lunch session. interesting to see the ‘real’ use of social media within big organisations. it’s all about effecting overall change and engaging with customers. stats and metrics are such a small part of the big picture.

will continue in part 3 – again pending wifi and laptop reliability (in the interests of social media commentary, don’t buy a samsung NC10, mine’s decided to crash and randomly power off recently – and only 2 months old.)

Up first is Alan Moore (@alansmlxl) who’s talking about how social marketing intelligence is the ‘black gold’ of the 21st century. Afraid his talk is extremely whistlestop and hard to keep up with so only limited notes!

- you don’t expect to learn social network theory when you go into marketing.. but you need to now
- gain a lot of insight from customers and social – including social revenue – how much a person influences their network – xtract
- bmw – took phone numbers and car info, MMS when winter approaching, buy new tyres – 29% response! relevant audience very useful
- augmented reality will be hot 2010 – ‘that’s weird shit right’ – but it’s just layering data.. like a map. joe the plumber – don’t you want to find out more about him – trust, schedule – local media could monetise on information, new revenue model
- qustodian – my yoad // girlswalker.com // threadless – community generated content
- localmotors – design car of your dreams, community vote on it. microfactories. customers come together, learn about cars, build car, return to local motors. exemplary service.
- data enables us to do some extraordinary things in business – but you have to be absolutely customer centric to succeed.
- i + we. we no longer stand alone. ’social everything’ = toxic tail end of industrial society – we’re almost at the point where we’ve deconstructed humanity – redefining ourselves as people “I’m an x” not a customer.  more enjoyable/ethical to see the “we”.
- interface w/o interference. interactive+connected+human. iphone successful => cuts away interference. threadless allows interaction without interference of other people getting in your way
- no online or offline, only blended reality (bill gibson) => deep context. let people engage authentically in a variety of way. not about social media – embedded sociability. not the platform, the people. human needs.
- technologies of co-operation amplify our human talents to do so.
- nemawashi – “to go back to roots” – build sustainable relationships on the roots of trust.
- don’t stand in the queue of information, stand in its flow. data and people are making all this happen.. enable it to flow.

Neville Hobson – WC Group @jangles [slides]

Trends & observations for leaders of great brands.

- some clear behaviour changes – we don’t trust corporate speak/marketingese, we fast forward our DVRs through ads (“because we can”). in PR world – we’ve lost control of our message – it’s now with the consumer.
- we are content creators, connected wherever and whenever we wish to be. we bring our behaviours to the market/workplace << don’t always fit with standard way we do things.
- business trends: marketers seeking lower cost solutions, want to see what our competitors are addressing because it affects what we do; desire for more accountable channels; focus on reaching customers directly; informal channels not formal structures. the mix shifting, very quickly, from traditional to interactive channels.
- focus on: social media  (34% compound annual growth rate til 2014 – forrester); mobile marketing big at the moment.
10 important trends
- customers co-shaping your reputation every day
- know exactly where conversations occurring, who has influence and why
- you realise media has already changed
- ethical behaviour key part of maintaining trust.

co-shaping:
- are you accidentally outsourcing your brand? what’s the first impression? motrin (US ibuprofen), dominos pizza.
- youtube 2nd largest search engine, know what words your customers are actually using about you, search is clinical.
- media world has changed – paradigm shift – blogs, customers asking each other for recommendations. no online/offline – one media world! you need to know which conversations are defining your brand. get a share of the conversation

- ethics – no fake blogs. no ghostwriters.

disclosure – policy http://www.socialmedia.org/disclosure/identity/

::the case for social media monitoring::
- it’s about knowing: where conversations happening, what your share is, what converations you should be in, who influencers are. if you don’t know these fundamentals how can you react, let alone pro-act?
- expanding news flow, make your content easy to get hold of, people more likely to talk about it.
- understanding communities – which matter, even niche networks? who drives share of conversation in these communities, what next steps in driving relationships?
- leveraging existing content and improving natural search.. once you understand audience you can work out how to repurpose content.

the value of listening – you have to listen, have to start somewhere.

antony @mayfield from icrossing – saywhat – iphone app (free SMM) [slides]

- after brands – listening and organisations.
- the end of brand as an outsourced, maintained thing.
- a web of connected people changes everything. not a change in media.
- howard rheingold – digital literacy – a new set of skills
- start learning how to manage attention, focus & drift. you can’t possibly listen to everything. esp for big brands. have to learn literacy of attention. participation, cooperation, critical consumption. how do we filter out people using product vs a real crisis. networks literacy. learning network theory poss the most important thing you can do.
- will become more sophisticated over time.
- tensions we have to work with all the time
- focus/forget it. we think we should be able to see/hear everything; not really the case. there’s so much data – we need to be a little more relaxed. not every complaint on a social network is going to be relevant/actionable.
- stories/numbers. tell stories from spreadsheets/data, got to be able to explain what’s going on in ways that are actionable. tension between data guys and story guys.
- realtime/slow news. are we making judgements too quickly, based on limited information? you can get involved in something big but you can also make mistakes/miss the point. slow news is a counterbalance. pay attention to the moment and think about the long term. Ushahidi open source platform for putting realtime information onto a map – how do you make sense of it all – and have a result you can learn from (a timeline of the events during a crisis). pull out curated, qualified valid information. client – 300k mentions in a search engine – need models to help deal with this.
- analysis/action. can become obsessed with data/modelling, IBM spending 10s of ks / month on this. how do you make it actionable, and fast?
- where does listening fit into your framework?
- social web literacy. use listening throughout the organisation to raise digital literacy of whole org. you can’t do that all in one place. got to start off with strategic/organisational [how do i wire up organisation to disseminate data and respond to it quickly]/tactical/personal points of view. don’t forget most people in the organisation are as new to social media as the organisation itself.
- measure engagement – awareness [stats] / actions [buying etc = passive] / advocacy [linking, mentions = active]
- when you’re listening it’s not enough to just listen to the text but look at behaviour too. highest levels of engagement = least amount of control.
- social engagement framework – will be on slideshare. this is where listening leads. clear about principles – where you’re starting and going with SM; platforms – digital – the ones you own and the ones you’ll be present in. processes – research&listen – live research – creative/curation/business – wiring it all back in.

Q&A
- level of understanding in businesses is growing – change agent/head of innovation/digital manager. seeing more and more of that. desire to engage but also pull back to “ROI targets now” thinking.
- “how much is it going to cost” – struggle with change from billboard/measurable type stuff – tyranny of numbers – process of migration. fear of change. tension.
- from MSM perspective, how do you define the concept of “customer”? neville – however my client wants to talk about customer (unless it’s radically wrong). it’s not the most important thing to think about. alan – it might mean different things to different people but the question needs to be asked.. when you build businesses around people [not product] [cool stuff happens] that has other ramifications.. worth thinking through, changes perception of how you might engage with people. antony – legacy ways of measuring marketing means we do need to find ways to wean orgs off big number syndrome. proxy measure that measures a big number, win that argument, then introduce real complexity/opportunity of networks and feedback loop. [these answers are really long and hard to summarise]
- silod culture/television – how do you measure the value to advertisers, used to oldschool advertising models. they want big numbers from specific places, “40k highly engaged users” isn’t appealing to them. > antony – it will be [packaged up attractively] eventually.. tons of people trying to solve this problem. alan – represents dichotomy of old/new ways of looking at this stuff.

will continue in part 2 (if wifi holds up) – key themes so far:

- there is no such thing as online and offline any more – no divide.
- listening is crucial, should be something that happens throughout organisation
- brand is something you have to get involved with, you can’t just fire and forget
- there’s a clash between the old-school spreadsheets, big numbers and ROI and the new-school engaged two-way customer interaction that is less measurable – hence the need for social media monitoring.

What are the key ingredients for success?

1. Give away something that makes people froth at the mouth. (Apple products tend to have this effect.)
2. Encourage multiple tweets, over time, to ensure constant visibility among trending topics (Daily draw only uses the previous day’s tweets, so people have to keep tweeting to win.)
3. Have visible, happy, real, winners.

Yet this has annoyed people, as it’s encouraged a flurry of spammy messages – leading to the question ‘will he who spams most win?’. Is the draw normalised? Does it take into account multiple accounts, or syndicates? There are so many ways to game something like this, it’s fortunate it’s only a 10-day promotion.

Will it leave a nasty taste in some people’s mouths? Undoubtedly. But it’s certainly got Twitter talking about Moonfruit. Is there no such thing as bad publicity? Sentiment classification, or other filtering, might help us understand what people think about Moonfruit – or whether they just want to win a laptop. (Almost undoubtedly the latter, no?) But when you’re just after volume, does the content matter?